Early years Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk was born February 7, 1893, in
Kharkov in the
Kharkov Governorate of the
Russian Empire (present-day
Ukraine), one of five sons of an ethnic
Latvian nobleman, a teacher, and
German mother. In 1914 he earned a degree in history and philology and in 1917 a degree in jurisprudence from
Kharkov University, where he also taught from 1913 to 1916. He joined the revolutionary movement and became a member of
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. Mezhlauk joined the
RSDLP (b) in July 1917.
Soviet career In 1917, after the
Russian Revolution, Mezhlauk became a member of the Kharkov committee of the VKP(b) and of the city's soviet and military revolutionary committee. From 1918 to 1920, during the
Russian Civil War, he served as provincial military commissar in
Kazan; people's commissar of finance of the short-lived
Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic in Ukraine; a member of the regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party of the
Donbas; a member of the military commandment in
Donetsk; a member of the
Revolutionary Military Council (Revvoensovet) of the 5th, 10th, 14th, and 2nd Armies of the
Red Army; a member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front; people's military commissar of Ukraine; and a member of the Revvoensovet of the
Tula region. In 1920–24, Mezhlauk was commissar of the Moscow–Baltic, Moscow–Kursk, and Northern railroads, including, in 1921–1922, as a deputy to the Chief People's Commissar for Transport,
Felix Dzerzhinsky. In August 1923 he was made a member of the governing collegium of the
People's Commissariat of Transport. He would remain at that post until November 1924 when he was moved to the Presidium of the
Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh), the Soviet chief economic planning agency. In November 1931, Mezhlauk was appointed the first vice-chairman of the
State Planning Agency (Gosplan), an institution which was emerging as central economic planning department in the state. He was the author of many works on the
socialist economy and was well known for his expressive caricatures of Soviet officials, including
Nikolai Bukharin and
Leon Trotsky, that he made during official meetings and Party conferences.
Arrest and death In the early stages of the
Great Purge, Mezhlauk was keen to show his loyalty to Stalin. When the Central Committee met in February 1937 to decide the fate of the former oppositionists
Nikolai Bukharin and
Alexei Rykov, Mezhlauk shouted at them: "You have been tormenting the party over many, many years and it is only thanks to the angelic patience of Comrade Stalin that we have not torn you politically to pieces for your vile terroristic work." He also drew a cartoon showing the figures of
Georgy Pyatakov and
Lev Kamenev – who had both been shot – pointing at Bukharin and Rykov, depicted as wild animals. Bukharin's tail had a swastika at its tip. In November 1937, the NKVD began the
mass arrest of Latvians in the USSR. Mezhlauk, who was half-Latvian and half-German, was arrested on December 1, 1937. and accused of treason, industrial sabotage, contacts with the German government, and heading a Latvian counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. He was sentenced to death on July 28, 1938, and executed the next day. He was posthumously rehabilitated in March 1956.
Family Father, Ivan Martinovich Mezhlauk (John Mežlauks), Latvian; mother, Rosa Schiller, German. Wife, Charna Markovna Mezhlauk (Maers-Mikhailova) (1902–1941), was arrested following the arrest of her husband in 1937 and executed in 1941. Younger brother, (1895–1918), was a Commissar of Jurisprudence in Kazan; he was killed by the
White Army during the Russian Civil War. The older brother,
Ivan Mezhlauk (1891–1938), also a Soviet government official, was arrested on December 3, 1937, and executed on April 25, 1938. Another brother, Valentin Mezhlauk, committed suicide in 1938. The youngest brother, Cornelius Mezhlauk (Корнелий Межлаук) (1905–1952), in 1938 officially denounced his older brothers and survived as a state and party official in
Kazakhstan; died in
Moscow, buried at
Novo-Devichye Cemetery. ==Footnotes==